Skin

"Restore and renew." "Significantly reduces the loss of cells in the epidermis." "Regenerate cells and repair tissue." The newest skin creams beckon with an air of scientific gravitas, holding out the hope that now, at last, medicine has triumphed over the visible aging process. With tantalizing biological references and understated packaging, the products are among the first on the market to capitalize on the public's insatiable appetite for stem cell technology.

Restylane, a popular cosmetic treatment for temporarily plumping out wrinkles, actually makes the skin produce more collagen, the natural stuff that makes skin look young, researchers said last week. That means the product, which millions of people have had injected around their lips, cheeks and foreheads, has effects beyond what its manufacturers claim, the team at the University of Michigan Health System reported.

PROTEINS from a glacier. Extracts from rice. Eye cream from white peonies. Face-firming Activators. Swiss Cellular De-Agers. Chanel. La Prairie. Creme de la Mer. Dr. Jessica Wu. Dr. Nicholas Perricone. Dr. Sebagh. Drs. Rodan & Fields. Wander among the cosmetic counters at your local department store and you might think that you've been transported to some Swiss sanitarium. White-coated doctors step out from behind exotic botanicals. European nameplates compete with pharmaceutical trademarks.

SORTING through the confusing landscape of ointments, creams and solutions found at the cosmetics counter doesn't require an advanced degree. Common sense and a little product awareness go a long way. Read the label and the literature. Here's a list of what to look for. Retinoids and retinols: Retinoids are vitamin A derivatives that are available by prescription only, such as Retin-A and Renova. They're the only substances proven to soften fine lines and wrinkles.

Laser treatments do not permanently remove birthmarks known as port-wine stains, researchers have found. The stains, caused by enlarged capillaries in the skin, occur at birth in 0.3% of the population and are most prominent on the face. Since 1989, removal using a pulsed-dye laser has been the recommended treatment for those who want them gone. But researchers at the University of Amsterdam found that the improvement was often only temporary, even after repeated treatments.

CONSTANT worrying about the sun and its power to burn, wrinkle and mottle the skin -- or worse, cause cancer -- comes with the summer territory. But what if there were an extra level of protection, say a pill or a lotion, that helped prevent the most common effects of too much ultraviolet light? Researchers are working on it. "Sunscreens are difficult to use properly," says Daniel Yarosh, president of AGI Dermatics, a Freeport, N.Y.

In the 1930s when Revlon founder Charles Revson uttered the now infamous slogan "hope in a jar," he probably didn't imagine that those seeking a beauty panacea in 2007 would also buy the notion of hope in a pill. In Southern California and across the nation, doctors, major skin-care brands and medi-spas are offering oral supplements to treat skin from the inside out.

When you slice a pear or an apple in half, that gentle blush of brown that spreads across the surface after a few minutes is called oxidation--a form of organic rust. And just like a sweet slice of fruit, our faces are oxidizing, albeit at a slower rate. The culprit behind this process is the highly reactive free radical, a molecular structure that interacts with skin cells and sets off a chain reaction that leads to the telltale signs of aging: wrinkled, sagging and stressed skin.

Researchers have solved a medical mystery that has eluded them for hundreds of years, demonstrating that an abundance of abnormal skin proteins causes the blotchy skin condition called rosacea. In a study published Sunday in the journal Nature Medicine's online edition, scientists showed that people with rosacea had too much of an incorrectly processed protein called cathelicidin. The results could aid researchers in designing an effective treatment for the disease affecting 14 million in the U.

I feel a fluttering inside me. Well, sometimes it's more like an elbow to the gut. She's my third child, a happy surprise. But the real surprise will come once she is born. We have a rogue gene in our family that gives her a 50% chance of having a rare skin disease called epidermolysis bullosa -- EB for short -- characterized by extremely fragile skin that becomes blistered with even minor friction. We got a crash course in EB when my first son was born, 10 years ago.